Innovator Vol. 38 No. 1 - Fall 07: RE-IMAGINING TEACHER EDUCATION
Return to contents Nancy Benjamin(AB ’49, CERT EDUC ’49)
Nancy Benjamin had no burning desire to teach when she received her certificate from U-M in 1949. But in that era, the career choices for women were very limited. “I didn’t want secretarial work,” she says. “And I liked children.”
Benjamin, now eighty, never dreamed that she and her late husband Marshall would start their own school which grew from a handful of kindergarteners to one of the top private schools (K-12) in Florida. Housed on two beautiful campuses on North Palm Beach, the Benjamin School enrolls 1300 students, boasts an outstanding college placement rate and enjoys the support of prominent locals, including golf superstar Jack Nicklaus, a past trustee whose five children are Benjamin grads. Although officially retired from the school (now a non-profit), Benjamin, known as “Mrs. B” to students and staff alike, is a familiar figure on campus—often reading to children under trees. She attends all school productions, and even took a walk-on part in Fiddler on the Roof. ”I’m still very connected to the school,” she says.
Although both Nancy and Marshall Benjamin made the school their life’s work, “Mrs. B” insists that Marshall (who died in 1985) was the visionary. “My mother always said that he never taught at a school that suited him,” she says.” He wanted to run his own school.” The young couple moved from Michigan to Florida where, for several years, they ran a small kindergarten in a rented house. Then —“footloose and fancy free,” as Benjamin puts it—they sold the little school and taught in Eritrea, Africa, for two years. Returning to Michigan, and determined to start another school, they drove a truckload of chairs and tables to Florida. In 1960, they opened the North Palm Beach Private School in a small house and a huge, dirt-floored garage. Again they started with only a kindergarten, “but it just grew,” recalls Benjamin. The kindergarten parents liked the rich curriculum—science, arts, music, even foreign languages—and especially the emphasis on reading, a passion of both the Benjamins. (They studied with Mae Carden, the founder of a well-known phonetics approach to reading.) Year by year, the Benjamins added another grade.
They thought they’d stop at sixth grade, but the Nicklauses and other parents urged them to build a junior high—and backed their requests with donations. “We ended up with a middle school and no indebtedness,” Benjamin recalls. Eventually a high school was added, and the school renamed in their honor. While growing their school, Nancy and Marshall raised an adopted son and daughter; another son died tragically, in childhood, of a brain tumor.
Benjamin says that the school insists on many of the values important to her and Marshall, including a healthy respect for authority. Students rise when their teacher enters the room. All children participate in athletics—“even as scorekeepers,” Benjamin says. “You have to learn to submerge your own personality to the group.”
Nothing pleases Benjamin more than to see the school’s graduates return as teachers. French teacher Lisa Arline, who attended the elementary school in the early sixties, recalls that her experiences were so happy that, after she graduated from college, “I came back to see Mr. B about a teaching job. Twenty-nine years later, to me, the Benjamin School is still a very special place.”
Story by Eve Silberman
